Winner
Matthew Brown – Sports in South America: A History
Matthew Brown’s history of sport in South America until about 1930 debunks the simplistic notion that sport was a uniquely British invention dispersed around the world. He does so first by showing that there was a rich and complex sporting culture well before the British cultural forces arrived. Not only was there an impressive set of Indigenous sporting activities, but the colonists – mainly Spanish and Portuguese descent – had sophisticated sporting and body cultures also. What’s more, in many cases those pre-existing sport cultures provide the basis for those built from the newly globalised sport practices of the later 19th century. In building this case he unpicks the school, the club, and industry as essential layers in this history and explores the growth, development and expansion of sport to by considering them as marked by aesthetics, endurance, controlled violence, and technology. In doing so he explicitly unsettles the colonial framing of South American sport. In ‘reading against the grain’ of dominant approaches to the field and the continent, Brown challenges us to think the field differently.
Shortlist
Roger Domeneghetti – Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Britain, Sport and the 1980s 
Roger Domemghetti focuses on the social and cultural history of the 1980s. His ability to weave together sporting and other social and cultural developments, his attention to shifting political cultures, and depiction of the era’s ambience all mark the quality of this as a scholarly exploration of the era. He builds a case that is episodic, where events and moments speak to contexts, and where those dialogues inform both an understanding of the era and provide rich insight to shifting sporting practices and cultures. This humane and humanising approach is a feature of the book. The book’s episodic form – this is no year on year linear narrative – provides ways into the era, making meaning and giving insight to both socio-cultural shifts and changes in the form, shape, practice, and context of sport as a cultural phenomenon. Domeneghetti gives us a sense of the era, its cultural, social, emotional, and political feeling that sport, as an emotional as much as a physical pastime, is so good at revealing. This is sport history as a means to provide an excellent, accessible, informed way into the era.
Rachel Hewitt – In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors
Rachel Hewitt’s impressive and engaging exploration of women’s outdoor physical activity both bridges important gaps in understanding and builds compelling commonalities in women’s experiences of the outdoors across 140 or more years. The focus of her historical inquiry is an Anglo-Irish woman, landowner, and mountain climber Lizzie Le Blond who provides a sense of the depth and sophistication of women’s outdoor lives and activities. Hewitt explores the ways that Lizzie’s late 19th and early 20th century experiences link to and illustrate the commonalities in women’s early 21st century experiences, reflecting on women’s contemporary outdoor physical activity. More innovatively, Hewitt explores what Lizzie’s life tells us about the changing Victorian attitudes to women’s outdoor lives and physicality, showing that the exclusions we associate with the era were not an ahistorical static phenomenon, but developed shifting from tolerance, sometimes begrudging, to active exclusion by the early 20th century. In doing so, Hewitt draws a subtle and nuanced picture of shifting attitudes, approaches, and outlooks in ways that inform the contemporary while also maintaining the distinctiveness of the past.
Alex Ireland – Pretty Poly: The History of the Football Shirt
Alex Ireland investigates and extends understandings of sports uniforms as standing in for all manner of being and identities. He reminds us here that the uniform is quite recent in sport. In his focus on football shirts he gives insight to this history and the design, production, and semiotic challenges of the ever changing, multiple shirt designs a year we see in football, while showing just how recent those trends are. He does this by tracing the emergence of the football shirt, its design features, exploring both the impacts of commercialisation and technical capabilities especially printing and fabrics. In addition he steps into business history and discussion of the design and production process while also grappling with environmental costs and production ethics. This is very much a focus on the shirt as artefact, as cultural identity marker, and as informing ways we make sense of sporting iconography. All this adds up to be a layered, richly cast unpacking of a ubiquitous and meaningful aspect of contemporary popular culture.
Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff – Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA